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THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

IT’S CHRISTMAS weekend and, at family gatherings everywhere over the next 72 hours, as many quarrels as champagne bottles are likely to pop. Early.
People who haven’t seen one another for a year – often because they deliberately avoid it – are going to be thrown together for at least several hours and, likely, several days because people aren’t going through the rigours of air travel for only a week.
Christmas joy could well extend to the new year.
You have to have a plan to get through all that family unity.
Luckily for you, I am a veteran survivor of dreadful Christmases past. Of course, it’s my own personality that made most of those bad Christmases into fully fledged miserable ones but that doesn’t mean I haven’t learned. Follow these tips and you may leave the family Christmas as whole as you entered it; or at least as one of the walking wounded and not in a body bag.

Stay drunk. Almost everyone in Trinidad makes too much poncha crema and no one minds you hitting it at breakfast, once you sing the classic Kitch line: “Drink a rum and a poncha crema, drink a rum/Mama, drink if you drinking!” (The Lord Kitchener should also be taken literally: drink a rum and a poncha crema = add a shot of straight rum to your glass.)
You can avoid the morning-after hangover by starting every day with more alcohol. Keep topping up your semi-permanent drunk until New Year’s Day.
You will then pay a massive health bill with a week-long hangover teetering on the edge of alcohol poisoning, but your Uncle Rajin will still be talking to you and Tantie Dorothy will not cut you out of her will.
If you can’t stay drunk:

Form alliances. The extended family will arrive with historical alliances intact. Like Britain and France going into World War I, you and your partner (with your children Serbia, Montenegro and Russia) will enter the No-Man’s Land of your parents’ home knowing full well how powerful and belligerent your elder brother Germany and sister Austria-Hungary are. But forget about all those other WWI Allied small fry, Granny Canada and Tantie Portugal and them, and make an early beeline to brother-in-law Bulgaria.
You will never get your jealous sister, the Ottoman Empire, to join the alliance, but, if you can keep sarobhai Bulgaria sympathetic, the Central powers may not become strong enough to go to war when your Nana pelts a lash on your brother’s son, the family equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. If the Great Powers do line up for battle, though, and war seems imminent, you need to:

Avoid a vaccine discussion. Anti-vaxxers are the new religious extremist proselytisers. All the evidence and science may be against them and their unvaccinated dead may pile up by their thousands, but they will still go over the top with nothing more than their belief in their hands and their completely baseless conviction in their hearts.
Show them the unvaccinated are six times more likely to get the virus and almost 12 times as likely to die from it (HealthcareITNews, CDC) – and they will show you a Facebook post whereby this guy died the day after he got the first jab, and don’t forget Nikki Minaj’s cousin’s testicles!
Every time the conversation threatens to turn towards vaccines (really, anti-vaxxing), Trump or Brexit, steer it to an enemy common to everyone in the English-speaking Caribbean: the West Indies cricket team. Better to rain some blows on their heads than your family’s. Too besides, they’re accustomed to getting licks.

If all else fails, faint in the middle of the room. (Also called the Basil Fawlty at the Hotel Room Door Manoeuvre.) All that loose gunpowder of overcharged emotion lying everywhere at Christmas still needs a spark to explode. If Uncle Brylcreem should only open his mouth to shout at Auntie Rum Jumbie that she should stop her piggish son from hogging the cashew nuts, stand up, put your hand to your head, let out as falsetto an “Ohhhhhh!” as you can and collapse like the PNM in a Tobago House of Assembly election. Recover slowly.
With luck, the troublesome relations may leave before the police need to arrive.

BC Pires is Santa Clawed. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com
The post The BC guide to surviving Xmas appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.